Head of institute in Moscow Vitaly Naumkin: Portrait of Soqotra’s first ethnographer (part 1 of 3) [Archives:2003/06/Reportage]

BY SERGE D. ELIE
FOR THE YEMEN TIMES
Prof. Vitaly Naumkin is the first, and the only one thus far, to have written an ethnography of the inhabitants of the Soqotra archipelago. He has dedicated part of his career to researching the ancient civilizations of the southeastern part of Yemen for over thirty years.
When I met with him in Hadiboh in the winter of 2002, he was on a one-week reconnaissance trip to the island to try to reconnect with the place and assess the feasibility of pursuing new research ideas. As he explained, “I am tired of what I have been doing for the past ten years, as I have been occupying a number of administrative posts.”
He is currently the Director of the International Centre for Strategic & Political Studies, as well as the head of the Centre for Arab Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow. Also, he is the Editor in Chief of “Orient” the magazine of the international centre.
He was relishing the recently offered opportunity to spend the upcoming semester at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, to teach Islamic politics. This was his first appointment in the US, and it was perhaps a form of international recognition of him as a scholar who has achieved some prominence in his field.
Also, perhaps this was an opportunity created by the cataclysmic event of September 11, 2001, and the need felt by the American academy to palliate the phobia against Islam it had given rise to, by recruiting knowledgeable international scholars to provide a more sober perspective than what might be available locally.
He acknowledged that he was not the same man he was thirty years ago when he arrived in Soqotra for the first time in 1974. He was perhaps referring to his changed look. The black beard had turned entirely white and the hairline had receded all the way back.
Nevertheless, he felt he still had something left to contribute. Three colleagues archaeologists accompanied him. The current mission was self-financed, which is an indication of his renewed commitment to do research on the island. His last visit was about two years ago after an absence of ten years, and was funded by a German foundation for linguistics research. From now on he hopes to return to Soqotra more regularly.
Intellectual background
I asked him how he would describe himself as a scholar, given his multiple intellectual interests. Surprisingly, he said he considered himself a historian in the tradition of the historical comparison school, since he has been involved in studying the histories, the peoples and the languages of the Middle East. His doctoral dissertation was on Islamic history and philosophy of the 11th century. It was an assessment of the contribution of the Sufi theologian Al Ghazali to Islamic thought. His second dissertation for a state doctorate was on Yemeni history.
He began his academic career as a teacher of Islamic Studies. Social anthropology seemed to have been a secondary intellectual preoccupation, at least to linguistics. For in the context of Soqotra his primary interest seemed to have been linguistics, or more specifically ethno-linguistics. In effect, Prof. Naumkin is a product of the four-field specialization of anthropology that prevailed during the classical period of the discipline, namely: socio-cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistics and archaeology. He accepted the designation of being an Orientalist.
As he saw nothing imperialistic about the term in spite of Edward Said’s devastating attack on those who studied the Orient. For him the term is merely a reference to the specialist of a particular geographical area of the world, as Europeanist or Africanist would apply to those who study Europe or Africa, and did not connote any hegemonic political design, at least not on his part.
Indeed, “Orient” is the title of the journal he edits, and as such betrays a certain innocence vis-à-vis the negative connotative baggage associated with the term. He admitted the influence of British social anthropology. It was not clear whether this influence was due to personal contact or a certain affinity with the conceptual repertoire of British anthropology, especially with the concepts of kinship and social structure as well as the evolutionary emphasis of its discursive practice. He was also fond of semiotic analysis, which he deployed in his first Doctoral dissertation to complement the philological exegesis of Al Ghazali’s texts.
In terms of the social anthropology/Orientalist scholars on Yemen, he holds in high regard he mentioned Paul Dresch, Walter Dorstal and R. B. Serjeant. The choice of these three exemplars betrayed an attachment to, or predilection for, the traditional/classical -I am tempted to say even pre-modernist- discursive tradition.
The designation “pre-modernist” is invoked here especially in the case of Serjeant who seemed to mimic, in some of his writings, a method similar to that of “isnad”, which is a mode of argumentation that entails the genealogical tracing of evidence through uncritical listing of references to who said what, where and when, used by some of the Arab medieval scholars he studied. In the case of Dresch, tribalism in Yemen is seen as an ontological fatality, and he seemed more preoccupied with maintaining anthropology’s ancestral legacies through demonstrating the continued pertinence of the received suppositions of the theories on the Arab Middle East formulated by his 19th century precursors, especially William Robertson Smith.
The intent here is not to minimize their substantial scholarship, but to point out that at the current disciplinary and historical juncture such discursive practices and theoretical emphases appear problematic indeed. In fairness to Prof. Naumkin, however, it should be noted that the menu of published ethnographic works from which to choose is particularly meager, and the consumption of what is on offer does not necessarily induce intellectual admiration, but skepticism vis-à-vis the interpretations of Yemen’s cultural realities that these works contain.
These interpretations -or better, vagaries of the Occidental imagination- range from the prosaic to the fantasist, and convey an impression of the Yemeni cultural subject as archetypically “traditional”, which is a euphemism for pre-modern exotic. When asked if he had gone through an intellectual transition, he said no, just a progression.
To be continued…


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